Contents

Introduction

Each episode goes through several stages in pre-production: premise, script, dialog recording, and storyboard. The storyboards detail each shot and most of the layout, posing, and camera actions. After storyboarding, backgrounds are created or re-used, and the preliminary staging, composition, and color balancing is refined by the layout department, who ship the layouts to the animation department. After animation and animation revisions, the episode is further refined in post-production.[3]

The design for all characters and their color schemes are subject to approval by Hasbro.[6] The background ponies mostly share two body types–one male and one female-and are generally only differentiated from each other by pony type, mane style, mane color, coat color, eye color, and cutie mark. There are hundreds of different ponies whose color schemes or designs are distinct from each other even though they share the same design, although some of the background ponies are used more frequently than others, such as Lyra Heartstrings and Sweetie Drops. These two ponies are used by a layout artist for added visual gags.[7]

Recurring background ponies

Among all of the background ponies that are used in the show, there are twenty-two mares that are used consistently in Ponyville, and as a result are the most commonly seen in the series. They typically occupy crowd scenes and react to actions performed by the main cast, or, on rarer occasions, even interact with them. These twenty-two characters consist of six Earth ponies, six Unicorn ponies, and ten Pegasus ponies, each one sharing her design with at least one other. Their names as given by the show, merchandise, or currently held with a placeholder, are as follows: